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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how multispecies relations operate as quiet forms of discipline in industrial agriculture, producing agricultural subjectivities aligned with the demands of agro-industrial value chains.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how multispecies relations are mobilised to stabilise agro-industrial value chains and produce agricultural subjectivities adapted to industrial requirements. Drawing on ethnographic research on the industrial potato sector in Belgium, I analyse how relations between firms, farmers, potatoes, and soils operate as quiet registers of power and dispossession.

Rather than approaching multispecies relations through empathy or care, the paper foregrounds their disciplinary dimensions. For example, potato varieties selected for industrial efficiency function as socio-material devices that preconfigure agricultural practices, temporalities, and investments. In an industrial farming context, these varietal demands intersect with other constraining arrangements, including contractual relationships. Taken together, these overlapping demands limit farmers’ control over their labour and land, intensifying experiences of estrangement or alienation, while paradoxically leaving the bulk of ecological and agronomic risks under farmers’ responsibility.

At the same time, the paper shows how the capacities of potato producers to cross geographical and biophysical frontiers – their ability to cultivate fragmented, distant, and often degraded soils – become valued competences. This detachment from specific soils and places contributes to the process of subject formation, serving the industry’s need for expandable supply chains. In this configuration, the material responses of soils and plants – such as accelerated nutrient depletion associated with industrial potato varieties – undermine long-term land attachments, facilitating producer mobility and shaping extractivist effects alongside human practices.

By analysing these dynamics, the paper shows how multispecies relations are deeply implicated in the organisation and stabilisation of industrial agro-food systems.